To
the backers of the Davenport Promise initiative, the developer of the
model on which it is based has some words of caution:

The
Promise is not a sure thing. It's not a silver bullet. And it needs
to be part of a larger community-improvement push.

Janice
Brown was superintendent of the Kalamazoo, Michigan, public schools
when that community's Promise was created two years ago and now
serves as the program's spokesperson. (She refuses to call it a
"program," by the way.) In Kalamazoo, a private, anonymous
donation is being used to provide money in perpetuity for college
education for all the students in the city's public schools.

In
Davenport, an advisory group has tailored the program to this
community, and is exploring the idea of a ballot initiative that
would redirect Davenport's local-option sales tax to the Promise
and public safety. (See "Building a Better Promise," River
Cities' Reader Issue 654,
October 10-16, 2007.)

Although
Brown is the public face of the Kalamazoo Promise, she said in an
interview last week that nobody from Davenport has contacted her.
Furthermore, she said that one shouldn't read too much into the
program's early successes - such as a one-year enrollment
increase of nearly 10 percent in Kalamazoo.

"You'll
never get me to say that two years of results on the Kalamazoo
Promise are conclusive," she said. "The local citizens here
understand that we are in this for the long term, that the two years
of results that we have are preliminary, and that we have to study
those results and make mid-course corrections as we go along, or we
will not be successful."

She
emphasized that the Promise only addresses one area in a community.
"It is not a program. Kalamazoo Promise is just that - a promise
of a college education. What is greatly needed has really nothing to
do with Kalamazoo Promise. But what the Kalamazoo Promise has done is
sort of pie-in-the-face kind of awareness of all the work that needs
to be done in this community ... on behalf of its children in terms
of four areas": education, community support for education,
economic development, and city, county, and state programs.

Promise
targets only one area - expanding the educational commitment of the
community from 12th grade to college graduation - and it's not
comprehensive, dealing only with the affordability of college.

"The
community has to understand deeply that a high-school education is no
longer enough," she said. "The system of K-12, which was created
200 years ago, is absolutely archaic in terms of what people need to
learn, and at the least, they have to have a bachelor's degree."

In
other areas, she said, communities need to provide all their children
with "all the support systems that students that are advantaged
have," including health care, mental-health care, child care,
after-school care, food, mentoring, and tutoring. Some of those come
from government programs, and some from citizens. Some are monetary
commitments, while others involve people's time.

She
noted that one analysis found all those support systems to be
expensive propositions. "With the needs of our children, it might
take as much money and as many resources to get children to
the Promise as the Promise
itself costs," she said.

And
she stressed that it's a community
commitment: "Every single citizen that you stop on the street and
ask, ‘What are you doing for the Kalamazoo Promise?' must have an
answer."

Brown
said that a ballot initiative is a good way to ensure community
buy-in. If it's approved by voters, citizens actually have a
monetary investment in the program's success.

Furthermore,
she said, the Promise program cannot be sustained if the larger
community can't provide jobs for the people who want them.

One
difference between the most recent Davenport proposal and the
Kalamazoo initiative is that organizers here want to ensure that
Promise money doesn't reduce the amount of financial aid for which
students are eligible.

Kalamazoo
is a "first dollar" program, meaning that need-based aid is
reduced by the Promise commitment. "They could make it based on
second dollar [in Davenport], or after other scholarship programs
have been explored," Brown said. "That makes it very, very
complicated. I wouldn't recommend it, but I think it can be done."

Brown
said that neighboring school districts could be hurt financially in
the short run by a Promise program, but that it could be a long-term
benefit to the larger community. "If they have a lot of kids going
to Kalamazoo public schools, they lose revenue," she said of other
school districts in the same area. "If I get 40 of their kids,
multiply that by 8,000 bucks [of state aid], you're talking about
some big money.

"The
issue for them is trying to make sure that they have a quality school
district that wouldn't cause their families to want to move back
into the [Kalamazoo] school district. And it has caused, I think, a
healthy competition."

She
also said that leaders of surrounding school districts have been
supportive of the program, in part because it has been successfully
positioned "as a regional economic-development initiative. ... A
deteriorating, crime-ridden, overrun community in the urban center of
the community has a very negative effect [on outlying areas].
[Understanding] that takes some pretty enlightened thinking."

In
Davenport, the members of the Promise exploratory committee have been
explicit that they're participating as parents, grandparents, and
community members rather than as representatives of their employers.
"You can say you're not the superintendent, or you're not the
CEO, and you don't represent an organization," Brown said. "I
don't know who you're trying to kid. ... You are who you are, and
you work for who you do."

Davenport
leaders might be sensitive to the fact that their boards haven't
formally supported the proposal, but Brown said institutional backing
is important. "They should be" representing their employers and
their boards, she said.

In
Kalamazoo, she added, "everybody knows it's everybody's
business, and they better jump on the bandwagon, because there's a
lot to do to make this work."